Author: Lynn Carroll, C’93
Penn is a fertile breeding ground for those unlikely juxtapositions that would never happen in real life. They’re so much fun to watch. Like when the Balalaika Orchestra and the Amorphous Jugglers perform on College Green at the same time, or when a professor in a tweed blazer with (obligatory) elbow patches runs a gauntlet of students hawking Vagina Monologues tickets.
Case in point: Marian Puro Froehlich is an octogenarian sculptor who graduated from Penn in 1948. Marian was on campus for a tour of Addams Hall, the undergraduate fine arts building, and she graciously offered to talk to a bunch of 2-year-olds in my daughter’s “Rainbow Bears” daycare class about sculpture. They couldn’t even pronounce “sculpture,” but they loved visitors, so I figured, what the heck?
She didn’t dumb down her work, or talk to them like little idiots—she just told them, pleasantly, that each of them could create sculpture if they wanted to.
All you needed was to use your imagination, then try to express what you see inside your mind. Something about seeing those children, mesmerized as this woman created a figure with clay, made me smile.
Frankly Penn 